Apple Cake

I'm lucky enough to have apple trees in the garden and this year they've produced loads of cooking apples. Here's one of the ways I've been eating them.

Ingredients

750g unprepared cooking apples

225g self-raising flour

1½ teaspoons baking powder

225g castor sugar

150g butter

2 large eggs

1 tsp vanilla essence

Method

Preheat the oven to 180°C.

Grease a 24cm (or thereabouts) cake tin with a removable base.

Peel, core, and slice the apples into pieces about 3mm thick.

Melt the butter. A microwave is good for this.

Beat the eggs with the vanilla essence.

Put the flour, sugar, and baking powder into a food processor and mix. If you're using unsalted butter then add a pinch of salt as well.

Add the eggs and vanilla essence to the food processor and process briefly.

Pour in the melted butter, and process briefly. You should end up with a fairly sludgy consistency.

Put half of the sludge into the baking tin, cover with the apple pieces, the add the rest of the sludge. Roughly even out the mixture with a spatula and allow to stand for a few minutes.

Bake the cake until it's done i.e. a skewer inserted into the middle of the cake comes out clean. This should take about 45 minutes. If the cake starts to burn, e.g. because you set the oven too high, cover it loosely with a piece of baking parchment.

Remove the cake from the tin, then cool on a wire rack until desired. It's good eaten warm with cream or ice-cream, but is also good cold with tea. Assuming you can resist eating it all the cake keeps well for a few days.

Some variations

Almond goes well with apple, so you could try swapping the vanilla essence for almond essence, or replacing some of the flour with ground almonds.

If you want an even more moist cake with the same basic idea, then Chocolate and Zucchini have a recipe1

I'm tempted to try some sort of caramel variation too. Perhaps just using darker sugar with molasses would work, but I'm tempted to preprocess the sugar by partially caramelizing it and then blitzing it back to a powder with the food processor. If you try this, please let me know how it came out.